RIAA and a woman from South Carolina are fighting after RIAA’s attempt of amending its original complaint. The woman is in a trial with the record labels for file-sharing.Until last fall, RIAA is dealing with almost 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits. One of the cases, regarding the lack of specificity of the standard language, is Atlantic Records v. Catherine Njuguna.
The complaint announced that: "Defendant, without the permission or consent of Plaintiffs, has used, and continues to use, an online media distribution system to download the Copyrighted Recordings, to distribute the Copyrighted Recordings to the public".
In the case Interscope v. Rodriguez, Judge Rudi M. Brewster refused to grant the labels a judgment first because the defendant didn’t appear in court and second because there aren’t any facts presented by labels "that would indicate that this allegation is anything more than speculation".
RIAA tried to particularize the infringements specified in the complaint, mentioning the date and time the investigators detected file-sharing action and the IP address identified. RIAA also wants to give details about Njuguna's alleged infringement.
Njuguna's attorney Jason Scott Luck, trying to answer to the RIAA's motion of amending its original complaint, showed that the language in the amended complaint doesn’t correspond with the testimony of Doug Jacobson, the RIAA's expert witness who gave depositions in several cases, among which the Jammie Thomas one.
Jacobson testified that SafeNet, the RIAA's investigator, cannot identify a certain person, while the amended complaint gave the following information: "Plaintiffs identified an individual using on the P2P network KaZaA at IP address 67.9.63.16 2005-10-29 on October 29, 2005 at 03:22:51 distributing 361 audio files over the Internet."
Thomas' attorneys, as questioning Jacobson, revealed the fact that if the IP address and the identity of the device can be discovered, the things are not similar regarding the identity of an individual: "The IP address delivers to a device or location". The exact answer gave by Jacobson was: “That’s correct ", "The IP address tells you the identity of the computer".
Jason Scott Luck also made a comparison between looking for a person after a given street address and identifying the "internet location where infringing activity" happened. A flesh-and-blood person is hard to be discovered using only this little information.
It is likely that, after finding IP address and filing a lawsuit to an unknown individual, RIAA could get an ex parte subpoena, in order to determine the name and address of the person behind the IP address. But, sometimes, it happened that the discovered person had nothing to do with the alleged infringement.
In the Atlantic v. Njuguna case, only the IP address of a piece of Internet-facing hardware like a cable or DSL modem was found and not the human being who leaded the action. What’s more, the located IP address could be that of a device directly connected to the hardware, which could be a PC, laptop, wireless router or anything else. As a suggestion, RIAA must try to be more precise in order to avoid such circumstances. |
